WebCrush.Blog

No political message here, but I’m just wondering about the viability of all these newly popular social network websites and technologies that are sprouting up all over.  Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc.  How many do we need, and how different are they really?

I find it interesting how similar this is to the instant messenger boom seen 7-8 years ago.  We started out with two major players–AIM and ICQ, but that quickly spread to MSN, Yahoo, Google and so on.  Everybody had accounts with each of them, sometimes multiples of them.  Each provider was vying for your eyeballs and wanted to be the messaging standard.  Coordinating them all was a pain, synching up contacts across them was a nightmare.  People pushed for open environments and APIs and what did we get?  Additional IM clients that suported numerous protocols–like Trillian.

The instant messenging bubble has come and gone, only to be replaced by these social network sites.  Many are quite similar, focused on allowing groups of ‘friends’ to follow each other, post updates as to what they are currently doing, share pictures, and essentially socialize.   Have we simply replaced instant messnegers with social sites (which provide messenging as well, ironically)?  Does anyone see the trend how we are repeating the situation all over again–companies fighting for your attention, all wanting to be the standard, and no interoperability between them?

Again we see third parties, like Digsby,  come along and provide so-called mashups pulling and pushing data from various sources into one medium.

How long until this fad dies out and we get to start over again?  Maybe we’ll get it right for once.

I wanted to briefly comment on the total disrepair our school systems appear to be in.   As someone who’s has been through the public school system, I was always of the belief that the education provided was more than adequate if one put the time and effort into it.  Coming out with a high school diploma wasn’t going to get you very far but a lot of basics were in place–the ability to read, write, basic math, and history.

Fast forward fifteen years and I decide to obtain some post-graduate degrees.  What I expected was that I’d be sitting side-by-side with much younger peers, recently out of college with higher learning freshly on their minds, and for the most part I was right.  What I found shocking was the level of education some of these so-called college graduates had.  Basic facts and concepts that I would have expected to be instilled at the high school level had not even occurred at a collegiate level.

What has happened here?  Why has this occurred?  Have our standards diminished so low that our schools are permitted to deteriorate to the point that we can no longer feel confident that they will provide a decent education?  Will I be forced to send my daughter to private school just for her to be prepared for the real world?

Each day I sit side by side with others who haven’t read the Declaration of Independence, that aren’t aware that the US Civil War had larger implications that just slavery, or that academic writing forbids the use of first and second person personal pronouns.  Don’t ask them to identify where Afghanistan is on the map.  It’s truly shocking.

I’m glad to see that President Obama is looking to improve our education system, and not only does it need to happen at the grade school level, but the university level as well.  Many students are skating through college and earning a degree based on attendance, especially as professors incorrectly feel the pressure of having to provide higher grades to justify the exorbitant costs these schools charge.  Maybe a decrease in collegiate education should be had.  I sure wouldn’t complain if some of that government bail-out money was instead used to indemnify existing student loans.

Not sure what that means, but we’re here, blogging.  And when I say ‘we’, I use it in the royal sense as it’s just me.  I’ll be updating look and feel of the site and frankly just goofing off.  Feel free to leave me a nasty comment.